ich he had lying
alone on the floor or sofa, when kept from going to church on a Sunday
by ill health. Child as I was, I could not help being highly delighted
with his description of the glories he had seen--his misty and sublime
sketches of the regions above, which he had visited in his trance.
Recollecting these descriptions, radiant and not gloomy as they were,
I have often thought since that there must have been a bias in his
mind to superstition--the marvellous seemed to have such power over
him, though the mere offspring of his own imagination, that the
expression of his face, habitually that of genuine {p.090}
benevolence, mingled with a shrewd innocent humor, changed greatly
while he was speaking of these things, and showed a deep intenseness
of feeling, as if he were awed even by his own recital.... I may add,
that in walking he used always to keep his eyes turned downwards as if
thinking, but with a pleasing expression of countenance, as if
enjoying his thoughts. Having once known him, it was impossible ever
to forget him. In this manner, after all the changes of a long life,
he constantly appears as fresh as yesterday to my mind's eye."

This beautiful extract needs no commentary. I may as well, however,
bear witness, that exactly as the schoolboy still walks before her
"mind's eye," his image rises familiarly to mine, who never saw him
until he was past the middle of life: that I trace in every feature of
her delineation the same gentleness of aspect and demeanor which the
presence of the female sex, whether in silk or in russet, ever
commanded in the man; and that her description of the change on his
countenance when passing from the "doggie of the mill" to the dream of
Paradise is a perfect picture of what no one that has heard him recite
a fragment of high poetry, in the course of table talk, can ever
forget. Strangers may catch some notion of what fondly dwells on the
memory of every friend, by glancing from the conversational bust of
Chantrey to the first portrait by Raeburn, which represents the Last
Minstrel as musing in his prime within sight of Hermitage.

I believe it was about this time that, as he expresses it in one of
his latest works, "the first images of horror from the scenes of real
life were stamped upon his mind," by the tragical death of his
great-aunt, Mrs. Margaret Swinton. This old lady, whose extraordinary
nerve of character he illustrates largely in the introduction to the
story o